


Beatrice

by Draikinator



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: AU, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Post-Series, high-grade, shameless self indulgence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 11:01:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3689802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draikinator/pseuds/Draikinator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Place to post vignettes from an AU I like to spin with my skype friends about a happy post-tfp world with Raf on cybertron as a cybertronian doctor and blades as a medical apprentice and beeblades and a not dead soundwave and where the sparks that came from the well at the end of predsrising were actually reincarnated from those who died during the war. Happy au!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bleeding in Binary

Raf tugged at the wiring with a careful precision, quickly separating the connectors and stripping the insulated casing, before brushing some of his hair out of his glasses.

"Now?" Asked Blades, hesitantly, hefting the welder behind him. Raf shook his head and leaned further in, up to his elbows in circuitry, using a handheld soldering iron to replace the fried wiring below.

"No, hang on, I just need to-" Raf trailed off, distracted, before kicking his tiny organic legs and pulling himself out of the open hatch, "Yeah, alright, you’re good."

Blades shuffled forward as Raf dropped down to the platform below, scooting back and out of the immediate way. Blades leaned over the patient’s head, reattaching the sawed off plating with the welder, while Raf shimmied down the ladder beside the operating table and back down to the floor to basin his size to wash the various mechanoid fluids from his blue-black dripping arms.

"No, no, slow down, you’re going to miss- ahhh, there you go, just like I showed you, lovely," Knock Out chastised above, watching over Blades’ weldwork. Raf pulled himself up the other ladder to the databank to monitor the patient’s vitals, a careful tiny eye accustomed to the fluctuating inner mechanisms of Cybertronian systems far more than likely any other organic that had ever lived.

"Hey, KO, how’s her EM field?" He said, leaning back over his shoulder to look at the red mech leaning over the operating table, who waved a hand at him inconsequentially.

"Nothing abnormal, a bit tight, but she is somewhat unconscious at the moment, so I’m not worried."

Raf nodded as Blades finished the weld and backed away to let it cool while Knock Out prepared his own array of specialty tools for sanding and buffing the scar clean, something he preferred to do on his own.

"Did I do okay?" Blades asked hesitantly, clutching the welder to his chassis and looking hopeful.

"Vitals are good, so I’d say you did a satisfactory job," Raf chuckled, leaning against the databank with a sigh, "What would you say, KO?"

Knock Out snorted, “Well, it will hold, but I’ve seen better.”

Raf rolled his eyes, “Quit whining, Breakdown can start his apprenticeship in a half cycle. You’re not exactly in danger of anyone else snapping up his mentorship, half the medical community is afraid you’ll eat them and the other half is eating out of your hand as it is.”

Knock Out seemed to swell some at this and smirked, “An astute observation for one with such low resolution optics,” he purred, the usual banter over Cybertronian superiority more of a habit than anything these days.

Raf stood up and stretched his arms, before tapping his glasses, “Which is why I got an upgrade.”

He took another look at the monitors, holding stable, and turned back to Blades, “Alright there, buddy, looks good, but we best leave Knock Out to his work before he shoos us out of here with a rotosaw.”

Blades perked up, before looking bewilderedly down at the welder in his arms and then around for somewhere to put it, before setting it on a nearby table with needless tenderness, before trotting over to Raf’s table and offering him a metal palm to clamber up, before sitting himself on one shoulder.

Knock Out didn’t spare them a wave as they made their way out of the operating room and back into the hospital general, tiny organic surgeon and his very large scooter-alt escort. The very concerned blue mech in the waiting room looked up at them as they stepped out, wordless with worry.

"Don’t worry, she’ll be fine," Raf said, sitting straight, "It was just a little fried wiring glitching her systems- a simple fix. She’ll only be a little longer and we’ll pull her back out of stasis."

He sagged with relief, “Primus, thank you, doctor.”

"That’s what I’m here for," Raf said, nodding, before he gestured towards the hall and Blades turned down it.

"I need to drop by my office and do some paperwork, but Bee said he would drop by to see how your first day in surgery went," he said, tapping Blades’ audial fin and stretching again.

"Oh! He did?" Blades said, perking up again, and Raf chuckled, that even after nearly a decade, Blades still lit up like Christmas around Raf’s brother.

"Yep, commed him before I scrubbed down to let him know I’d be skipping racing. Here we go, just- yeah, go on, drop me off right here, that’s fine. Catch you later, Blades, tell Bee I said hey," he said, slipping down with a practiced motion and calloused hands to the floor to key open his office door, the small one.

"Kay!" Blades said, waving as the doors slid shut, pedes papping excitedly at the floor.


	2. Mourn the Living

Bumblebee didn’t bother knocking before entering, but he never did. He spent enough time in Raf’s residential block that it was practically his, but he wasn’t entirely prepared for what the door opened to.

Raf didn’t look up at him when he entered, curled over his laptop, a waterfall of wires and cables spilling out the back of it and into the databank set into the wall, far too large for such a small user, but he did lift one hand to wave at him lazily. Bee eyed Soundwave, who did look up at him from his seat in the corner, warily and with caution.

"Hey, bud, what’s up?" Bee said, setting in by his brother to peak at the screen.

"Sear…" He trailed off, distracted, before typing something rapidly and looking up, adjusting his glasses, "Searching the Autobot databases for unrecorded Decepticon casualties. Videos, mission reports, stuff like that. There’s a lot to go through."

Bee’s optics spiralled open, confused, “Huh? Why?”

Raf gestured toward Soundwave, who looked down at him, then back up at Bee, silently. “He asked for my help organizing a comprehensive obituary for the Decepticons, since they didn’t keep a lot if records for things like that.”

"Why?" Bee said, tilting his head, "All the old sparks came back from the well after the restoration- they’re all fine, now."

Soundwave made an odd sort of whirring-chirp noise, some kind of digital field recording that got Bee’s attention, and his visor lit up with a video of Breakdown, the young Breakdown, smirking bashfully.

"Hah- oh, uh, sorry, what was your name again? I’m so bad with those." A burst of static, and an older recording, something that looked like a ship camera, overhead, in what looked like barracks full of Vehicons, and Breakdown, the old Breakdown, laughing. "Shiv, Rotorburst, Airstrike, Wingtip, Headercross- hey, hang on a sec, you’re not Headercross!" A chirr of laughter through the crowd, relaxed, "Burstblade, really? Switching barracks to trick me? You know that never works!" The recording cut out as the vehicons laughed, an odd, tinkling, staticy sound Bee had never heard before.

"…They’re different," Bee said after a moment, and Soundwave dipped his head just so, lightly, confirmation.

Raf kept typing, “Been working on it during my off shift for a couple of weeks now, but there’s only so much a creature that needs eight cycles recharge every twenty four cycles can do.”

Bee pinged Iacon to let them know he’d be dropping by later to pick up some data discs, “I’ll see what I can do.”


	3. Fuck

"What’s the problem?" Knock Out purred, resting his chin on his servos and his elbows on the chrome bar, "A little young for high grade, are you?"

Blades set his jaw and picked up the cube with a determined expression, “No! It’s just that some of us run precision internals that are easily affected by this sort of thing, and have to be ca-“

"So you’re a lightweight?" Knock Out said, raising an optic ridge with a smirk and sipping from his own cube. Blades pouted and narrowed his optics, and otherwise responded only by tipping back the cube and downing the entirety of its contents in a single swallow.

* * *

 

"Uh… Senator Bumblebee, sir?"

Bee looked up from his paperwork when his comm activated on an official channel and felt his tanks flip at the worry in the unfamiliar voice.

"Yes? What’s wrong?" He said, standing up from the databank and unlinking his auxiliary ports in his wrists from the databank’s main connectors.

"Well- um- I know this is your public comm, but I couldn’t find a personal number on the net, but um- okay, look, I’m a bartender down in the East End, and, uh- I’ve seen you with Doctor Knock Out on the holovids and I didn’t know who else to call about-"

"Ping me the coordinates, I’ll be there in a tic," Bee sighed and cut the comm, standing. Of course it was Knock Out.

He arrived at the bar as quickly as he could, and was met with a large crowd of disgruntled machs sitting outside, who watched him with pointed interest as he stepped inside the sliding door to find the room a mess of broken steel tables and scattered cubes, trampled into the corners. Knock Out was backed into the far corner, rotosaw equipped, tires spinning, engine revving, and gesturing wildly at Blades, who had him backed into a corner with a spinning death wheel of his vestigial rotor blades, kept even after he rescanned to scooter for reasons no one understood.

"You have no fragging idea!" Blades yelled, voice breaking like he’s been crying, "How dare you say _Paranormal Activity_ was scrap!"

Knock Out rolled forward with his rotoblade, and Blades dipped back expertly, far more expertly than was really appropriate for a medic in training who had never been in real combat, “ _Paranormal Activity_ is a mess of absolute new age garbage relying on lazy story telling tropes and a fabricated sense of suspense to make up for poor acting and a low budget! And everything after the first one was cheap fanfiction!”

Blades hiccuped a sob and dropped his rotors, fisting his servos at his sides and shrieking, “How dare you! You think _the fragging Omen_ was good!! It had ketchup blood and the worst cinematography I’ve ever seen! And it was so predictable!”

Knock Out transformed his arm back into a servo and punched Blades square in the jaw.

"Whoa!" Bee said, stepping forward, hesitant, but they didn’t seem to acknowledge him at all.

"It was fantastic for the time of its production!" Knock Out sobbed, chassis heaving. Blades stared up at him from the floor, one servo on his jaw, bewildered, before he too broke into tears.

"I’m sorry," Blades said, rubbing at his optics, "I love _The Omen_ , I don’t know why I said that."

Knock Out wobbled, before tipping back onto his aft on the floor and covering his face in his servos, sobbing, “I love _Paranormal Activity_ , too, but you said that Romero was overrated and I just didn’t know what to do-“

The remainder of the conversation was so wracked by blubbers that Bee couldn’t figure out what the pit they were saying as the clubg to eachother in the debris of the bar he was certainly going to have to pay for, and he pinched an imaginary nose between his optics, a habit picked up from his family, and sighed, using the only appropriate phrase for the situation, a lovely earth curse that flowed off the glossae beautifully.

"I’m too fucking old for this."


	4. Sometimes the Best Support is a Calculated None

Soundwave adjusted the beam another two micrometers to the left, stepping back to look at it again, scanning the positioning and recalculating. He stepped forward and adjusted it another micrometer to the left, and this time nodded, satisfied.

He moved to the next pillar, holding up the shattered bit of roofing with his arms and the welder with his auxiliary cables, following the line of the metal seam slowly, carefully, deliberately.

Soundwave received a ping on his personal comm.

“Yo, Sounders, you okay?” The tiny organic’s voice was casual and odd- no matter how many times the spoke, the absence of any sort of natural mechanoid interference in the communication was always strange and alien. Not entirely unpleasant- the organic only communicated auditorily via comms without em pulses or glyphs or bursts of any kind, and his communications were quieter, simpler, more literal, and far less exhausting than speaking to his own race.

Pleasant, but certainly alien.

He pinged back an affirmative signal and finished the weld line, nudging the second pillar into place beneath in and laying into the rail driver, pinning it to the ceiling.

“Good, you’ve been missing a couple days, I was starting to worry.” Soundwave adjusted the trajectory of the rail driver, punching in a metal spike to the base of the pillar. The organic was likely the only one concerned about his absence- beyond the obvious observation that a few days to Soundwave’s race was more like a few minutes or hours to the organic’s perception of time, the remainder of Cybertron’s population now was mainly Autobots, and Autobots whose deaths he was largely responsible for outnumbered those whose lives he had saved a hundred to one. The organic seemed the only one concerned with his presence beyond resenting it. “What are you doing?”

It was an alien sort of feeling, to have this organic so worried about his whereabouts without having anything to gain from such, but not unpleasant either.

He pinged back a data package of images of what remained of the Floor 27 D block Residential Unit he was repairing in lower Kaon, along with the coordinates and the schematics for it’s repair that he had calculated and was working from.

There was a pause while the organic presumably reviewed the data. Another comfort, it’s alien slowness, having to review data secondhand, without an internal processor. It was far less personal, knowing he could not see nor even comprehend the codestrings within files that identified him so individually, that such digital and mechanoid identifiers were beyond his species’ abilities, as impressive as his individually were.

“Gotcha. Personal stuff. Do you want me to send down a repair crew to help?”

He pinged back a negative.

“Understood. I’ll note that you checked in in the logbook, and I’ll put your coordinates in as H block. Should net you a few more days of privacy. If you need anything, you have my personal comm. Do you need anything?”

He pinged back a negative.

“Okay. When you hit the surface though, please come by the hospital and let me do your repairs okay? Don’t make me organize another search party to come find you half starved down there again. Okay?”

He pinged back an affirmative as well as an expression of gratitude before realizing two things with a start: one, that he had not intended to express gratitude, and two, the organic could not possibly understand such a complex ping.

He paused, before opening his drives and booting up his outdated vocoder.

“Thank you,” he said into the line, quietly, before cutting his comm and returning to repairing the ruins of lower Kaon.


	5. You Sure Are Eloquent for a Four Foot Tall Meat Sack

“Where are you going?” 

Knock Out looked up and away from the data bank, his servos stilling on the keys. The organic was standing on the catwalk, eyeing him. It was a tiny thing, a fleshy little alien, young and small even for its own tiny species, with some kind of brown growth on its head and optical enhancements- some kind of weird medical defect. It was staring at him, even in the dim light, and Knock Out was startled it could see him- but he did have a tendency to underestimate their low-light sensory capabilities, despite their poorness in it.

“…Nowhere,” he said, optics returning to the screen, but watching the organic from the corner of his field of vision. Its optics were on his servos, silent.

“You’re going to the moon,” the organic said, and Knock Out froze, optics darting to it, “To Airachnid.”

Knock Out stared at it, then at the screen and its coordinates, before narrowing his optics at the alien dangerously, “It’s none of your business.”

“She’s going to kill you.”

“Not if I kill her first,” Knock Out returned to typing, trying to ignore the nuisance.

“Not if you kill both of you, you mean? Wheeljack’s missing a grenade.”

Knock Out swore and had to abort a drill transformation in one arm, optics scrunched shut, “You’re four feet tall, you can’t stop me, and you can’t get anyone who can stop me in time to stop me.”

“I’m not going to stop you. I understand why you think it’s worth it,” Raf whispered, “But you know he’s out there, somewhere, in all those waves, and he’s alone.”

“He’s different!”

“He needs you.”

Knock Out threw his staff across the room, screaming something wordless, “She deserves this!”

The organic eyed him behind its optical enhancements in the darkness, soft, “I never met him, but if he cared about you as much as you do him, he wouldn’t want you getting killed out there.”

Knock Out sobbed an angry, choked noise, fingers digging into the databank.

The organic was silent, before it hopped down on the databank he was leaning on. He let it move his servo, gently, and it hopped onto the keys, disengaging the coordinates before looking back up at him.

“I know it hurts,” it whispered, “It gets better.”


End file.
